Aviation Week editors who wrote Inside MRO&#x27;s June cover story on M&amp;A activity in the aviation aftermarket discuss key takeaways and a few things that didn&#x27;t make it into the feature.

Will The Wave of M&amp;A in Aviation MRO Continue?

Aviation Week's MRO Podcast

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** Aviation Week's MRO Podcast

## Transcript

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. Welcome to the latest MRO Podcast. Today's topic is mergers and acquisitions in the aviation aftermarket. I'm Leanne Shay, Aviation Week's Executive Editor for MRO and Business Aviation, and joining me is colleague James Pazzi, who is our MRO EMEA Editor. James, welcome to the podcast. Hi Lianne and hi everyone.

So James and I co-wrote Inside MRO's June cover story about M&A in MRO, today's topic, and we wanted to explore that a little bit further in our podcast. So to get us started, James, we're in what people are calling a super cycle of MRO. When we started looking at the cover story, one of our promises was, you know, is this going to continue? Is the M&A interest in MRO going to continue?

So what is your opinion? What did you find? Well, yeah, the evidence does suggest that Aviation MRO is still in a genuine super cycle in 2026. Although there are signs the market may be nearing a peak in the valuation side, rather than demand itself, of course. There is a lot of demand there, and we'll be looking at some of that today, where that's coming from. And it's fair to say the appetite for this investment is reshaping the sector's landscape.

So MRO companies right now, there are many things on their shopping list when they're looking for a company or what they would like from that potential acquisition. Of course, there's the financial side, the predictable returns, a good, you know, proven, tried and tested company that can deliver solid returns over, you know, certain timeline, three to five years, for example, maybe even longer term.

There's the scale it brings as well. That's very valuable. Scale is very important in our industry right now, and always has been. There's the capability side. Some people are buying companies to add capability, whether it's completely new capability or bolstering, I guess, their existing offerings in certain segments.

And then there's capacity as well, of course. And capacity is much sought after, as we know, given some of the tight bottlenecks currently in the industry and those tight shop capacities in the market. And there's other things like intellectual property and, of course, access to new customers. You know, some of these acquisitions do bring on board a lot of new customers for the would-be buyers.

In our article, of course, Oliver Wyman partner, Chris Higgins, he's quoted, he calls it a super dynamic environment. And I could not agree more with Chris. I think that's a really good description of where we are right now in the MRO aftermarket. And of course, as we know, there's a big imbalance at the moment between supply and demand. It is very much demand driven. There's increasingly older fleets across the world that are still in operation and running for longer.

There's, of course, the supply chain disruptions that we've covered so extensively over the last how...

Will The Wave of M&A in Aviation MRO Continue?

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Will The Wave of M&amp;A in Aviation MRO Continue?

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Will The Wave of M&A in Aviation MRO Continue?

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.